He feels as if he
were passing through life with a sharper accent which stirs his personal
energies. The usual make-up of the photoplay must strengthen this effect
inasmuch as the wordlessness of the picture drama favors a certain
simplification of the social conflicts. The subtler shades of the
motives naturally demand speech. The later plays of Ibsen could hardly
be transformed into photoplays. Where words are missing the characters
tend to become stereotyped and the motives to be deprived of their
complexity. The plot of the photoplay is usually based on the
fundamental emotions which are common to all and which are understood
by everybody. Love and hate, gratitude and envy, hope and fear, pity and
jealousy, repentance and sinfulness, and all the similar crude emotions
have been sufficient for the construction of most scenarios. The more
mature development of the photoplay will certainly overcome this
primitive character, as, while such an effort to reduce human life to
simple instincts is very convenient for the photoplay, it is not at all
necessary. In any case where this tendency prevails it must help greatly
to excite and to intensify the personal feeling of life and to stir the
depths of the human mind.
But the richest source of the unique satisfaction in the photoplay is
probably that esthetic feeling which is significant for the new art and
which we have understood from its psychological conditions.
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